Courtesy of TheObamaCrat.com

Posts tagged ‘environment’

Canada is witnessing a similar heavy-handed control over government scientists as the United States saw under the George W. Bush administration and its censorship of climate research and other environmental sciences. This conflict between government agenda and the free flow of knowledge science will have (and quite probably is having) a significant influence as to whether the Keystone XL pipeline is approved or not. It is quite probable the US State Department’s recent, appraisal report on the pipeline utilized the findings of potentially skewed science from Canada’s Harper administration.

With each new bit of regulation proposed a screeching chorus rises from industry pronouncing the dire consequences set to befall the country if even the slightest utterance of such rules are dared spoken. How many times have these warnings of cataclysm been heard? And how many times have they come to pass?

An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientsts finds that 93 percent of climate info on Fox News prime time and 81 percent on the Wall Street Journal Opinion pages is misleading. Steve Mirsky reports.

“We were following up on anecdotal and peer reviewed assessments to date that suggested that there was bias and misrepresentation at the News Corporation of the fact that human-induced climate change is happening, the vast scientific evidence that’s out there.”

A while back Fox News’s Steve Doocy hosted a report about the growth of glaciers in Asia as an indictment of the science which indicates global declines in ice sheets. Mr. Doocy deferred to the expertise of Chris Horner of the Competative Enterprise Institute, legal council for the organization, to explain the latest scientific findings that Himalayan glaciers have grown over the past 9 years, not shrunk. This apparent revelation is used to discredit the overall findings that global ice is in decline.

CLAIM: The stimulus bill’s support for clean, renewable energy sent jobs overseas.

FACT: Even the author most cited to support this claim says it’s not true. The stimulus has supported tens of thousands of jobs and billions in investment for renewable energy technologies.

Russ Choma of American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, who is often cited by critics of the stimulus bill’s clean, renewable energy policies, told the Washington Post on July 12 that his reporting actually showed no evidence of jobs being sent overseas. (Source: Washington Post, http://wapo.st/S96Mys)

Scientists in Greenland have uncovered evidence for what may be the oldest impact crater ever found. And it would be hard to find one much older, because Greenland has some of the oldest exposed rock on earth. It’s also good it happened a long time ago — this impact was huge:

This is quite a long investigative reporting article by ProPublica but well worth the time reading it through.

Oil drilling has sparked a frenzied prosperity in Jeff Keller’s formerly quiet corner of western North Dakota in recent years, bringing an infusion of jobs and reviving moribund local businesses.

But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil companies are spilling and dumping drilling waste onto the region’s land and into its waterways with increasing regularity.

The Heartland Institute, the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting scepticism about man-made climate change, is getting a lot of heat. In recent weeks it has lost an estimated $825,000 in expected donations, a couple of directors and almost its entire branch in Washington, DC. At its annual shindig in Chicago this week, the institute’s president, Joseph Bast, said Heartland had “discovered who our real friends are.” The 100-odd guests who failed to show up for the “7th Climate Conference” were not among them.